NFW to Hear about Kindle and then Critique at June 11 Meeting at Willowbranch

Pen Name Seems to Trigger Schizophrenia – Vic DiGenti

Cock-a-Doodle Do for a FWA Blog Just for You – Vic DiGenti

Lucky 13th Dan Lenson Novel Puts Him in Middle of Sept. 11 Drama

Cobb and Fracis to Tell about UNF Writers’ Confab

The Wrong Stuff – Howard Denson

Stuff from Hither and Yon

Stuff from a Writer's Quill –
Francois Truffaut

Meetings of NFW and Other Groups

Useful Links

The Write Staff

Membership Form

Writers Born This Month

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NFW TO HEAR ABOUT KINDLE

AND THEN CRITIQUE

AT JUNE 11 MEETING

AT WILLOWBRANCH

E-books
or tree books – which will prevail in the future? Since writers need to
keep all options open, President Stewart Neal will spotlight one of the
emerging industries in e-book publishing.
At the June 11
meeting of the North Florida Writers, he will give a short presentation on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) program.

This
should help those who have been frustrated at the inability of getting
works published and don’t want to go the self-publishing route. The NFW
meeting will be at the Willowbranch
library on the second Saturday of the month at 2 p.m. The public is
welcome to attend.

The NFW will also critique manuscripts at the meeting.
The
critique process has people other than the author of respective works
read aloud the submissions (up to 10 double-spaced pages of prose, and
reasonable amounts of poetry or lyrics).
Authors may not defend their work, but they should listen to the words
and rhythms of their creations.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

PEN NAME SEEMS TO TRIGGER SCHIZOPHRENIA

By VIC DiGENTI

A funny thing happened when I decided to publish “Matanzas Bay”under the pen name of Parker Francis. First of all, people
began looking at me differently, especially my wife. Guess she wondered
who this strange man was who looked a lot like her old husband. And I've
heard that it caused some confusion when my
photo appeared with the new name.

The
explanation for the name switch is simple—and it wasn't to hide from my
creditors
as one wag suggested. I simply wanted to differentiate the Quint
Mitchell Mysteries, which are for adults, from the Windrusher books,
which have a large young adult readership.

In my last newsletter I touted the growing presence of the digital revolution and
advised readers they could find “Matanzas Bay” on both Amazon.com for Kindle, and the Barnes & Noble Nook.
But another funny thing happened in that I heard from a lot of people
who said they weren't ready to join the digital revolution and wanted
one of the old-fashioned variety of books.

If
you are one of those who want the touch, feel, and smell of an actual
book in
your hands, then I have some exciting news. The real book has arrived —
and it is beautiful, if I do say so myself. If you want an autographed
copy (I'm still trying to figure out how to sign these things—Parker or
Vic), write to me at author@parkerfrancis.com and
I'll see that you get one pronto.

The popular Dan Lenson novel series reaches the lucky 13th story as author David Poyer tracks Lenson through the events of Sept. 11.

“The Towers” is being published by St. Martin’s Press on Aug. 30. To order the
book early, readers will need this info: ISBN-13: 978-0312613013.

On
the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Commander Lenson, USN, is visiting the
Pentagon. On that same morning, his wife, former Undersecretary
of Defense Blair Titus, is at a job interview at the World Trade
Center. In the action-packed scenes that follow, both Dan and Blair have
to fight to survive the attacks. Meanwhile, NCIS agent Aisha Ar-Rahim
is investigating a terror cell in Yemen, and former
SEAL Teddy Oberg is pitching an action movie to investors in Los
Angeles.

Teddy,
Aisha, and Dan immediately become involved in the military reaction to
the attack. Dan is assigned to the staff of the Joint Special
Ops team in Afghanistan. His mission: to overthrow the Taliban
government. Aisha undertakes a dangerous undercover mission in Yemen to
uncover links to Osama bin Laden and ultimately his location in the
Shah-i-Khot Valley, Afghanistan. Teddy, having rejoined
the SEALS, is assigned to Task Force Cutlass, a mission that takes him
to the border of Pakistan to hunt down and kill bin Laden. Meanwhile,
Blair struggles with recovery from serious injuries, and has to decide
which course her life will take from here.

Early reviewers of “The Towers” say it is a fascinating,
accurate depiction of the events of Sept. 11 and the military response,
informed by interviews and deep sources in the Navy, the SEALS, the
Marines, the NCIS, and the author's own military
experience. A past master of fast-paced sequences and heart-pumping
drama, David Poyer takes the reader into the center of the action and
face-to-face with the enemy.

Captain
David Poyer is the most popular living author of American sea fiction.
His military career included service in the Atlantic, Mediterranean,
Arctic, Caribbean, the Middle East,
and Pacific. “The Towers” is the 13th in his continuing novel-cycle of
the modern Navy and Marine Corps, following “The
Med,”
“The Gulf,” “The Circle,” “The Passage,” “Tomahawk,” “China Sea,” “Black
Storm,” “The Command,” “The Threat,” “Korea Strait,” “The Weapon,” and “The
Crisis”(all available in St. Martin's Press paperback and ebook formats). Visit him at <www.poyer.com> or on Facebook.

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COBB AND FRACIS TO TELL ABOUT UNF WRITERS’ CONFAB

If you want a preview of
the University of North Florida Writers ConferenceWriters’ Conference set for early August, tune in on WJCT's morning program (9-10 a.m.) on Tuesday, June 7.
Conference director Sharon Cobb and fiction-writer will be
on “First Coast Connect, hosted by Melissa Ross, to spread the word
about the conference.

Sharon
Y. Cobb, who will be a presenter at the conference, is the creator of
the comedy video website FunnyFixx.com and writer/director of the comedy
web show “Thurapy,” which has an international fan base.

She is a member of Writers Guild of America and has sold a dozen projects to Hollywood, including “Return
of the Sweet Birds” to Fox 2000 (producers: Danny Glover and Babyface Edmonds). Her British romantic comedy “Lighthouse Hill” was released in the U.S. on DVD in March
2009 after premiering at film festivals and being broadcast by SkyTV worldwide. “Easter Bunny Super Hero,” a short film she wrote and served as executive producer for, won Best of
Jacksonville, Best Screenplay and five other awards in the 2007 48 Hour Film Project.

She is the author of “Touched By An Angel,” “A Christmas Miracle,”and has lectured on writing in the U.S. and abroad. She owns Mad
Gator Films, Inc. and the Writers Pitch Book. She is also director of
the UNF Writers’ Conference and The Florida Times-Union/Jacksonville.com’s Cinemania. Visit
www.WritersPitchBook.com and
www.FunnyFixx.com.

Sohrab Homi Fracis, also a presenter, is the first Asian author to win the Iowa Short Fiction Award, juried by the
Iowa Writers Workshop, for his collection of short stories “Ticket to Minto: Stories of India and America.” He now has a novel in the works.

His stories and novel excerpts have appeared or will appear in “Slice Magazine,” “Other Voices,”
“The Antigonish Review,” “Weber Studies,” “The Toronto Review,” “India Currents,” “State Street Review,” “Ort der Augen,” “Writecorner Press,” and “South Asian
Review.” He taught literature and creative writing at the University of North Florida, was fiction and poetry editor at “State Street Review” and was visiting writer in residence at Augsburg College.

He has been a Florida Individual Artist Fellow in Fiction, a Walter E. Dakin Fellow in Fiction, and an artist in residence
at Seaside Institute and the art colony of Yaddo. Visit his website: http://www.fracis.com.

The
roosters began crowing at 4 a.m. this morning, rousting me out of bed
to get an early start writing the June post for the Northeast Florida
chapter
of the Florida Writers Assn. You'll find valuable nuggets of
information to help you plan your monthly schedule. Read all about area
meetings, conferences, awards and other good stuff at
http://fwapontevedra.blogspot.com/.

Now I've got to feed those pesky roosters or they'll never let me get any sleep. --
Victor DiGenti, Regional Director
www.windrusher.com

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THE WRONG STUFF – FORENSIC GRAMMAR

By HOWARD DENSON

In
the spirit of “The Treasure of Sierra Madre,” perhaps publishing houses
should consider handing out annual “We Don’t
Need No Stinking Copy Editors” Awards. It could easily go to ROC, a
division of Penguin. The winner would have to be Jim Butcher’s “Grave
Peril” (Book 3 of the Dresden Files).

It is irritating when you are reading a book and have a grammatical or spelling error GONG! the flow of the
narrative. One you can excuse, but how about these?

She saw Micky, laying quietly, and went to him as if she feared to stir the air too much, each movement fragile.
[pp. 107-08]

What the hell was she doing here? Laying in a van, covered up by blankets drugged and placed as neatly as could
be. [p. 129]

I found Charity laying upon a bier. . . . [p.173]

It would be so easy to lay down at my lady’s feet, now. [p. 238]

That’s the kind of fear I felt. . . . For all the young people now laying in the darkness, drugged or dying. [p.
256]

. . . [W]ithout a word, he retreated to the fireplace and picked up a poker that had been laying against some of
the logs. [p. 292]

I found her laying in the sun wearing a white bikini that left maximum surface area bared to it. [p. 376]

W.S. SAYS: If you want to refer to something or someone reclining or resting, you use “lying.” If a character is setting
down a plate, a sword, or an egg, you use “laying” (since you would have an object for the verb).

Unless Harry, I thought
to myself, they find you first. [p.109]

W.S. SAYS: A redundancy. “To myself” is not necessary. But, you ask, what about the song lyrics: “I think to myself
it’s a wonderful world”? All right, but only if it’s sung by Satchmo.

He reached the foot of the dias, inclined his head in a shallow but deliberate nod . . . . [p.261]

They hid the fairly large object, hidden beneath a dark red cloth, on the dias beside Bianca. [p. 266]

. . . I mounted the stairs to the dias. . . . No one, except maybe the pair of robed attendants at the back of the
dias, could hear us.” [p. 267]

My godmother glided forward at Bianca’s bidding, and paused for a moment, to glance up at the dias. [p.270]

I looked up to see Marva bound up onto the dias again. . . . [p. 277]

W.S.
SAYS: The book did spell “dais” correctly on a couple of occasions
before swinging and missing on a half dozen
at-bats. If you know you are going to be using a troublesome word,
scotchtape the correct spelling to your monitor. Later, take a couple of
minutes to focus on the correct spelling. Here’s a tip: After the
opening letter D, the rest of the letters are in alphabetical
order.

Could
a defense be made for the plethora of errors? Only one: The Dresden
novels end up being best-sellers, so the
author and publishers may not care enough about the craft of writing to
spend, say, $500 to get a good English grad student to proofread and
edit the material.

Another
argument might state that the story is told in the first person and
people make errors in their speech. Even
so, the craft requires that the narrator be consistent. Huck Finn, as
an example, speaks and narrates one way, but reports the accurate speech
of others. Ditto for Jonathan Gash’s Lovejoy scoundrel.

Now, let’s move on to other pieces, which have mere lapses instead of blatant and indifferent inattention.

**

“Warning over bin Laden gloating” (Florida Times-Union):

“We’ve ridded the world of someone who caused great evil . . . and the world is probably better off without him,”
[Rabbi Martin] Sandberg said. “But it won’t solve our problems.”

W.S.
SAYS: Beware of dictionaries that give alternate possibilities for past
tense verbs. It’s preferable to write
“I rid today” and “I rid yesterday. One major dictionary lists “ridded”
as archaic. You may protest that, since both forms are in popular
usage, one is as good as the other. Generally that’s not so. If an
editor is addicted to Fowler’s or Strunk and White,
he or she may frown at past tenses for various verbs being given as
“sung” (sing, sang, sung), “costed” (cost, cost, cost), “forecasted”
(forecast, forecast, forecast), and so on.

**

Erik Hayden, ”What If Palin Had Run on
Her Record?” (The Atlantic Wire.Com):

It
takes reminding, but Sarah Palin was once a capable governor. And, in
her time as an actual politician, she regularly worked with Democrats,
declined to pick fights on divisive social issues,
broke the oil companies vice on state politics and led Alaska to a $12
billion dollar budget surplus.

W.S.
SAYS: Three problems: We need an apostrophe after “companies" to show
possession . . . “Vice” is the British spelling;
use “vise” for U.S. publications . . . We have a redundancy with the
dollar mark AND the word “dollar.” Just write “$12 billion budget
surplus.”

**

John Stossel, “Give Me a Break” (HarperCollins):

A Reason Foundation study found that today’s new rail lines are so underused, each ride costs taxpayers $9 dollars.

W.S. SAYS: Another dollar-mark redundancy: Use either “$9” or “nine dollars,” not both. Also insert a word and remove
a comma: “so underused THAT each ride.”

**

Wade Tatangelo story about Kris Kristofferson’s career (McClatchy Newspapers):

Kristofferson's past two albums, 2006's “This Old Road” and 2009's “Closer to the Bone,” have also
enjoyed positive reviews, if not the super sales figures of, say, Johnson's output.

W.S.
SAYS: In an editing error in the Jacksonville paper, that was the final
sentence in a story about Kristofferson, but there was no reference to
who Johnson was. Could it
be Erik, Red, Josh, Buck, or Jamey?

What
happened? A layout or makeup editor had trimmed two sentences earlier
in the story to make it fit the available space. The editor could have
read what was being cut and
written in: “of, say, Jamey Johnson’s output.” Thanks to a Yahoo search for the full story, we found these missing sentences:

Jamey
Johnson, today's hippest country star, included a cover of
Kristofferson's classic “For the Good Times” on The Guitar Song, which
topped the country chart last year
and reached number four on the Billboard 200.

"I think Jamey's great and I feel a lot in common with him," Kristofferson said.

An
aphorism in a composing room (or now at the PC) is that you can cut a
story until it bleeds. Since the inverted
pyramid style means that most stories will go from most important
information to least important, stories rarely bleed. However, some do,
especially features that may have key information toward the bottom.

**

Daniel Levy, “Obama Gets Real on Israel” (The American Prospect):

Bush's
letter referred to, "new realities on the ground, including already
existing major Israeli populations centers," Obama's
speech did not preclude incorporating settlements into Israel's new
border, and in fact quite clearly endorsed that same notion by referring
to, "mutually agreed swaps" (Obama did not even insist on those swaps
being of equal size, as Europeans have done)
- yet the emphasis was sufficiently different to be noticed.

W.S. SAYS:Here we have a 68-word sentence that needs a semicolon or period
after “population centers.” In addition, it has unnecessary commas
before partial quotations (e.g., corrected, it should be “referred to
‘new realities” and “referring to ‘mutually agreed
swaps’”).

Sarah Palin has deliberately left the question as to whether or not she will run in 2012 open.

W.S.
SAYS: When you have a verb-preposition combination (as in “left open”),
move the preposition as close to the verb as possible.
The above sentence goes through a dozen words before it reaches the
other part of the verb.

In
March 2008, David Mamet was outed in the Village Voice. The Pulitzer
Prize-winning playwright had a comedy about
an American president running on Broadway, and—perhaps to help with
ticket sales—decided to write an article about the election season.

W.S.
SAYS: Imagine “an American president running on Broadway” and taking
curtain bows. If the sentence had said “widgets
and wonkers running on Broadway,” there would not be any confusion, but
add the element of politics and trouble beckons. This forensic
grammarian isn’t happy with one solution: “a comedy running on Broadway
about an American president,” but it could have sufficed
with a clock ticking towards a deadline.

Traces
of antidepressants such as Prozac have been found in both drinking and
recreational water supplies throughout
the world, in quantities experts say are too dilute to affect humans
but which have been found to damage the reproductive systems of mollusks
and may even affect the brains of animals like fish.

W.S.
SAYS: The major problem is that the sentence is 51 words and becomes
awkward later. Consider putting a period
after “world” and perhaps starting the next sentence with a clause:
“Although experts say blah blah blah.” “Merriam Webster Dictionary”
would accept “dilute” as an adjective, but “diluted” would sound better.
Those with backgrounds in science would not be
bothered by “dilute” as an adjective.

**

BeeAlive Ad in American Profile:

This Story Could Change Your Life! This family has discovered something so amazing it has benefitted tens of thousands
of peoples’ lives!

W.S. SAYS: Once again, the already plural “people” is having the apostrophe at the end instead of where it belongs:
“people’s”.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

STUFF

FROM HITHER

AND YON

Technology and the novel,

from Blake to Ballard

Writers
have long been fascinated by what machinery gives and takes away. In a
piece for The Guardian, Tom McCarthy charts literature's
complicated relationship with technology, at once beautiful and
menacing. McCarthy’s own experimental work has been hailed as the future
of fiction.

In The Browser’s regular feature on “FiveBooks,” Anna Blunty interviews military historian Michael Howard, who
describes the strategy, the art and the experience of war, from the pins in the map to the horrors of the front line. He recommends these five books:
On War by Carl von Clausewitz, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane,
The General by C.S. Forester, and Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, translator Robert Chandler.
http://thebrowser.com/interviews/michael-howard-on-war

Okay, so Why Do

People Say 'OK'?

Remy Melina explains how the word “OK” came about. It’s also spelled “okay” or “okeh,” although the
latter isn’t mentioned in her article.

Esquire Magazine has published much the best by 20th
Century writers. Their articles or stories include
snippy remarks by Faulkner about Hemingway and by Gore Vidal about Bill
Buckley. One of the 70 most memorable quotes was from “Horse Badorties
Goes Out” by William Kotzwinkle: “Dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky
dorky dorky dorky dorky . . . .”

This writing

life, by

Richard Ford

Richard
Ford says he is ambivalent: “I write novels and stories and essays for a
living. But is it work?” He tells The Guardian, “I usually refer
to writing as work because I don’t know what else to call it.”

John
Steele Gordon in The American: Journal of the American Enterprise
Institute says the book business will go through a transformation
in the next decade or so more profound than any it has seen since
Johannes Gutenberg introduced printing from moveable type in the 1450s.

The Case

—Please Hear Me Out—

Against the Em Dash

Noreen Malone
argues in Slate Magazine
that modern prose doesn't need any more interruptions—seriously. She
uses em-dash sentences to demonstrate how irritating they can become.
Not listed in the article are these problems: Dashes don’t travel well.
As text goes from, say, Word to desktop programs,
the em dash may be replaced by a code (basically meaning the character
can’t be found). Eventually the em dash (the long one) may be reduced to
an en one (shorter) or even to an outright hyphen.
http://www.slate.com/id/2295413/

The torture of putting

pen to paper is

only getting worse

His
handwriting has started to look like dangerously erratic reading from a
heart monitor, writes
Michael Deacon in the Daily Telegraph. He would like to be a
traditionalist and oppose Edinburgh University’s recent decision to
permit laptops in exams, but, like the students, he finds it a physical
strain to use a pen.